vegan food in Austin TX

Pro-choice til I die

One reason I started to write this blog was to write about things that were on my mind. Another reason was to share information. Usually it stays on the topic of veganism but, for me, veganism is part of a larger picture. Social Justice, Animal Welfare, Feminism, Environmentalism, Humanism, and most of all, so much fucking love in my heart are all the foundation of it.

Everything is interconnected. Some would even say there is a metapattern to it all. (Full disclosure: the first class I ever took at Evergreen was called metapatterns cause that’s the kind of school I went to).

That makes it hard to talk about just one thing. I have always had what some would refer to as a bleeding heart. I’ve been writing letters to politicians, school officials, and companies since I was a little kid. In addition to this, I can get really fired up really quickly. That latter quality can make it really difficult for me to get into arguments. I get so hot and it can last for days. Sometimes I can direct that passion into action and that’s why I wanted to write a better post about why I am pro-choice and why I think you should be too.

Aside from closing clinics under the guise of protecting women’s health another aspect of the Texas bill is that women will no longer have the option of getting an abortion after the 20th week. The supposed reason behind this new law is that at that point the fetus can feel pain. Like many many scientists, I don’t know what it is like for a fetus to feel pain. I don’t remember my time as a fetus. Is it more like how a toddler, a spider, a cow, a piglet, a piece of kale, or a shrimp feels pain? I have no idea. Scientists are certainly not even agreed on if a fetus feels pain at all. But I do know that the woman who needs to have an abortion in her 2nd trimester is suffering. 99 percent of all women who have abortions do it before twenty weeks. The women who have an abortion after are usually women that wanted a baby. Maybe they have already been thinking about names and designing the nursery. Why do they wait 20 weeks into their pregnancy? When they are already probably showing a baby bump?

This is what we mean when we say the decision to have an abortion should be between a woman and her doctor. It’s not just a cute phrase. I think a second term abortion the hardest decision many women ever face. These are the vast majority of this one percent of abortions. If you watched the public testimonies a few weeks ago you no doubt saw some heartbreaking stories of women talking about going through this process. Another unintended aspect of the twenty week ban will undoubtedly be that women have an abortion before they can fully decide if they want to try and keep the baby because they know they will lose the option soon. Read a friend of mine’s story about being in this very situation.

In addition to these women’s health issues there are also women’s rights issues involved. Something I don’t really see anti-choice advocates talk about is bodily autonomy. They see the fetus as a life and that it should have the right to be alive no matter what its host’s body wants. But a woman is more than just a host. She is an American citizen and she has the right to do what she wants with her body. That’s why stealing someone’s kidney’s is illegal. You couldn’t tell a judge “well I needed the kidney to live and the woman has two of them anyway”. A woman can donate her kidney the same way she can have a baby, with consent and probably help from her doctor. No one demands people risk their lives through medical procedures that are unnecessary for them to save some else’s life. This is why women are allowed to decide whether or not that they are going to give birth to a baby.

You don’t have to support abortion to be pro-choice. That’s why it’s called pro-choice instead of pro-abortion. You just have to believe that other women can make their own decisions on what they are going to do with their own body.

So today I am going to go down to the capital and wear orange scream my guts out. Even though I know that Rick Perry loves to hear women scream and that it shows him how well he’s doing his job. When people in our society start to lose their rights, we all lose.

I am so impressed by this post and very proud of the fact that you are willing to address these very important issues publicly. It is only through sharing knowledge and being willing to expose our beliefs and the actions/misactions of others that we can make a difference. Thank you for doing both and standing up for women everywhere.

This is the best summary of the madness going on in Texas that I’ve read so far, I really appreciate you speaking out on this. Your links were super helpful and I will definitely share this post to help others understand what is happening in our state.

The thing I find hypocritical about the republicans is that if a mother finds out her baby has severe defects around the 20th week and she is not granted the choice to abort, then the child is born with those issues which may force it to become a burden on the state, a stress on the health care system, and basically a welfare person for life that doesn’t add value to society – I thought republicans hated those people? Also, freakonomics studies showed a correlation between the initial legalization of abortion and the ultimate reduction in nationwide crime levels in the 1990’s since our country was for the first time seeing the impact of low income mothers being allowed to abort unwanted pregnancies. Basically, republicans may be promoting increases in future crime levels through their actions today. Lastly, abortion leads to lower population which leads to lower joblessness rates in the future – you’d think the republicans could get behind something like that.

Ultimately, I see this bill getting passed and signed into law and despite the short term negative effect, I think it could turn into a positive…this could wake up Texas women and democrats and result in a flip-flopped political landscape in the future where Wendy Davis is our governor and this bill gets overturned with majority support. It’s just sad that this political ploy will hurt so many in the name of propping up Perry for a disastrous attempt at the 2016 presidency…he had his chance and he blew it, don’t make Texas suffer for your disillusioned ambitions.

I know I’ve basically vanished from Bloglandia, but I still love reading about your adventures and dream of an Austin vacation someday. This piece kicks ass, and so do you. Thank you for writing it and for trying to make things better.

It has been amazing to watch the passage of this bill and the scruitany it has received. My daughters and sons and I watched Wendy as she stood up for the rights of women to choose what is best for their own bodies and we cried when we knew the filibuster couldn’t last forever. Our hearts to all the women in Texas and to all who will suffer as a result.

Denying women a right to choose is unthinkable to those of us sitting up here in our priviledged world of choice and provincially funded reproductive care. It took our very own Wendy Davis to get us the access we needed but maybe he was taken more seriously because he was a man. RIP Henry Morgantaler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgentaler). May there be many more Wendys and Henrys that come forward to carry Texas into the present. We’ll be here waiting for you…

I am VERY pro choice. I”m Kenyan and in my country abortion of any kind is illegal. It’s even difficult to get birth control without some nosy nurse or doctor giving you a religious speech. but what really flipped it for me was high school. i was in boarding school in one of the high schools a few kilometres from the capital, Nairobi. it’s a very rural conservative area populated by Maasai (a tribe in my country) who still practise(d) forced marriage. Many of the girlls in my school belonged to the tribe. i remember one night waking up to hear one of the girls in my dormroom crying so i got up to see, turns out she’d overdosed on medicines to try and force an abortion. i can still see the look of pain on her face and the horror i felt when i saw sheets stained with blood. She put her life at risk so she didn’t have to carry this unwanted foetus. my mind was made up two days later after she came back from hospital and packed up her bags and left with an old man i later found out was her husband.

Oh Sharon, that story breaks my heart! I can’t even imagine going through something like that but it happens all the time all over the world. It’s what always happens when women don’t have access to safe legal abortion. I don’t understand why people want to put women through that.